For many years, medical research has been conducted on the treatment of burn and scald wounds on the human body. In the case of severe burn wounds, it has been found that even after the patient's condition has stabilized, serious infections often occur, sometimes with lethal consequences. In such cases, severely burned patients who survived the post-traumatic shock often developed what is called late burn disease resulting in death in a late phase with the apparent clinical picture of a local and generalized infection, i.e. sepsis. For many years, clinicians postulated the occurrence of one or more toxic substances produced by thermal energy in the skin as the basic cause of the late mortality.
More recent biochemical and biological investigations conducted by the present inventors and others have isolated and characterized a toxic lipid protein complex called "burn toxin" as the basic cause of late burn disease. In the course of research conducted by the present inventors in burn therapy, a number of instances were noted in which severely burned patients were found to have a better chance of survival if the burns were rapidly cooled immediately after even third degree burns had already developed. Several of these instances occurred when the victims were burned as a result of an accident on a boat and jumped into cold sea water immediately thereafter. In other instances, reports came from burn centers that cooling with tap water prevented significantly the development of hypertrophic scars of healing burn wounds, thereby avoiding the need for long lasting, expensive plastic and reconstructive surgery in the reconvalescence phase.
These phenomena are of importance not only with regard to the survival of the patients involved but also with respect to the shortening and easing or even elimination of complications in the reconvalescence phase and finally realizing better cosmetic results as well.
It has now been confirmed that these toxic substances or burn toxins formed by thermal decomposition of proteins weaken the immune defense so that the body is unable to resist the unavoidable invasion of bacteria through the wound area. It has been found that immediate and rapid cooling, i.e. within thirty to sixty seconds, after occurrence of the burn wound with cold water produces favorable results in several respects. In addition to immediately reducing the pain, the decomposition of proteins and the development of burn toxins is greatly reduced or even eliminated.
However, sources of cold water, ice or other cooling means are not always immediately available when a burn accident occurs. This is often the case in outdoor situations during work or in recreation time, in heavy traffic situations and often in certain household, office and school environments as well. In addition many people, in fact probably most people, are not aware of the enormous beneficial effects of immediate cooling of burn wounds and therefore adopt a large variety of so-called curative actions ranging from the application of flour, olive oil or butter or even so-called cooling leaves to the burn as well as other often traditional local "therapies". These measures are often more harmful than beneficial.